How to balance fights for a single-fight-per-day kind of game?

[bendking]

Hi there. My group recently came across the challenge of finding challenging battles.

We aren't an encounter heavy group, so squishing in more than one fight a day (let alone a session) is not something we would like to do.
We also don't really want to change into the Gritty Realism rules.

Thus, I ask: do you any of you have some experience with running games with these premises in mind?
I'd be glad to hear some suggestions on balancing fights to be challenging even when the party goes all out on each one.

[nakedonmyfoldin]

If you haven't already, take a look at Matt Colville's video on Action-Oriented Monsters. Basically riffs off Legendary Actions and makes these single monsters a little more nasty.

[Lupine]

You could also just pack it with higher than CR monsters.

[Catullus64]

I've run games that hew closer to a one-fight per day model. What I will say is that "balance" may not be the right goal for such combats. "Difficulty" and "balance" in D&D combat refers mostly to the threat of death, or short of that, drain on a party's allotment of daily resources. If the second point is not much of a concern, because you are unlikely to have to fight again before a long rest, you have two options: try to lean hard into making every combat deadly, or try to add elements of challenge that don't revolve around player resources or direct threats to their lives.

While simply making all of your combats deadlier is a valid approach, I think the second approach tends to stimulate creativity a lot more. Think of combat encounters as high-tension problems, to which killing the enemies is only a partial solution. Maybe the party needs to protect civilians from the rampaging monster. Mabye they need to disrupt a wizard's evil ritual, while still fending off his minions. Maybe it's a tournament or gladiatorial combat, where being impressive and putting on a good show matters just as much as victory. Maybe the heroes need to escape from a collapsing temple, while cutting a path through the hordes of undead monsters in their way. Maybe the combat takes place on a boat or airship, and the players have to take actions to prevent the ship from going down in the chaos. Maybe the monster itself is an unbeatable machine that part of the party needs to hold off while other members find the shut-off mechanism.

Summation: Instead of trying to make your combats work from the resources-and-mortal-peril assumptions of D&D rules, make the fun of combat hinge on something different.

[MaxWilson]

Hi there. My group recently came across the challenge of finding challenging battles.

We aren't an encounter heavy group, so squishing in more than one fight a day (let alone a session) is not something we would like to do.
We also don't really want to change into the Gritty Realism rules.

Thus, I ask: do you any of you have some experience with running games with these premises in mind?
I'd be glad to hear some suggestions on balancing fights to be challenging even when the party goes all out on each one.

Bigger fights, more complex fights, more emphasis on the before-and-after a fight. Emphasize uncertainty: if your objective is to overtake and capture a pirate ship where you see 12 pirates on deck and a fierce pirate captain, the fight is straightforward and perhaps boring for a 6th levle party if they know that all of the 12 pirates are just CR 1/8 Bandits and the captain is a CR 3 Veteran--but if they are not quite sure if the pirates are really just Bandits or maybe they are Githyanki in disguise, or maybe the pirate captain is a 10th level fighter, or maybe there's a beholder hiding in the ship's hold... if they're not quite sure, the game will still be fun as the players scheme to catch the pirates off-guard at night in their beds, even if 60-80% of the time it turns out that the pirates really were weaklings after all.

See this thread http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?602911-As-a-player-how-do-I-determine-the-level-of-NPC%91s and this thread https://www.enworld.org/threads/very-long-combat-as-sport-vs-combat-as-war-a-key-difference-in-d-d-play-styles.317715/ (especially posts #1, #5, and #9) for more ideas on how to make this kind of game fun.

It definitely requires upping the difficulty of some or many fights well beyond DMG Deadly, but it doesn't require upping all of the fights--you're just trying to make the players afraid of what could go wrong, so they have a reason to play it smart.


While simply making all of your combats deadlier is a valid approach, I think the second approach tends to stimulate creativity a lot more. Think of combat encounters as high-tension problems, to which killing the enemies is only a partial solution. Maybe the party needs to protect civilians from the rampaging monster. Mabye they need to disrupt a wizard's evil ritual, while still fending off his minions. Maybe it's a tournament or gladiatorial combat, where being impressive and putting on a good show matters just as much as victory. Maybe the heroes need to escape from a collapsing temple, while cutting a path through the hordes of undead monsters in their way. Maybe the combat takes place on a boat or airship, and the players have to take actions to prevent the ship from going down in the chaos. Maybe the monster itself is an unbeatable machine that part of the party needs to hold off while other members find the shut-off mechanism.

Summation: Instead of trying to make your combats work from the resources-and-mortal-peril assumptions of D&D rules, make the fun of combat hinge on something different.

+1, excellent advice. These are all good scenarios where the game is about something larger than just the fight itself. In my experience, games that are built around mostly-noncombat stuff with combat as part of a high-tension resolution to some scenarios give players a lot of freedom and are a lot of fun. I expect that's probably the kind of game the OP likes to run, which would explain why they are so resistant to the idea of switching to lots of encounters every day--it doesn't leave enough room for that kind of fun out-of-combat stuff that gives you a reason to be in combat.

"Capture the pirate ship without the pirates blowing it up in revenge" is another example of this kind of scenario, where it's still interesting even if the pirates do turn out in the end to be relatively weak in combat.

[stoutstien]

Hi there. My group recently came across the challenge of finding challenging battles.

We aren't an encounter heavy group, so squishing in more than one fight a day (let alone a session) is not something we would like to do.
We also don't really want to change into the Gritty Realism rules.

Thus, I ask: do you any of you have some experience with running games with these premises in mind?
I'd be glad to hear some suggestions on balancing fights to be challenging even when the party goes all out on each one.

-Multiply all short rest resources by 3.
- never use solo NPCs.
- use waves or encounters with multiple rooms/floors/areas that players and NPCs can move too.
- have encounters that are not combat that can potentially drain resources.
- challenging ≠ deadly all the Time. Sometimes the situation calls for something other than who can out Damge who.

[Man_Over_Game]

This is a topic I am pretty passionate over. The number of combat/risk scenarios vs. the amount of rest your team gets is a pretty big deal. Much bigger than the handbooks make it seem.


Too few encounters/Short Rests:

Wizards, Paladins, and other Long-Rest dependent classes are too strong vs. Short-Rest equivalents (Fighters, Warlocks)
Short-term healing (Clerics) are more valuable than long-term healing (Druids)
Fights are unbalanced and bursty, due to fitting an entire day's risk, resource consumption, and HP loss into a single encounter. Instead of figuring out how to deal 100 damage over 10 rounds, you're now figuring out 100 damage over 3. Fights are either too easy or too hard, with no middle ground.
Hit Dice don't do anything, which penalizes classes that have high values (Barbarian, Paladin, Fighter).

Too many encounters/ Short Rests:

Adventures slow to a crawl, with 2-3 fights per day taking 30 minutes each.
To speed combat up, enemies may be made weaker, to the point of providing little challenge or interest to the players.
Flow gets disrupted, due to many DMs not being experienced/comfortable with fitting 3+ encounters per day.
Feels "gamey", having several breaks throughout the day as "heroes".



My solution, to fix pretty much all of these, is having Short Rests be implemented in the middle of a fight. Make the fight slightly difficult, have the boss do a "Rage mode"/"Form Change"/Whatever that triggers either when the boss hits 50% HP or when the players start losing badly, give everyone a Short Rest after the trigger, rebalance the boss on the fly with some slight changes (based on how easy or hard the first half of the fight was), and let your players do their thing.

This means your Short Rest classes are BOTH high-stamina dungeon hunters AND high-octane boss slayers. Instead of having to balance everything perfectly before the fight starts (where you just guess what's going to happen), you can use what you just witnessed in the first half to fine-tune the fight to be a thrilling experience.

I made a more detailed writeup of this concept, called Adrenaline Surge. Link is in the signature, if you're interested.

[MaxWilson]

Wizards, Paladins, and other Long-Rest dependent classes are too strong vs. Short-Rest equivalents (Fighters, Warlocks)

Fighters are more no-rest than short-rest. Specific subclasses may add to that (Battlemaster = short rest, Eldritch Knight = long rest), but in general a fighter is going to be much better than a paladin at e.g. a non-stop solid 60 rounds of combat, especially because paladins are pigeonholed into melee and fighters excel at ranged combat. Past level 6, even a melee fighter will have more feats than a paladin and can compete on those grounds.

IIRC you analyzed sword-and-shield Fighter DPR vs. sword-and-shield Paladin DPR, but that comparison is right in the paladin's wheelhouse. GWM/PAM Fighter vs. sword-and-shield paladin would probably be more fair, unless you want to make the Paladin GWM/PAM too (but then the Paladin suffers for ASIs). Either way it diminishes the relative importance of Paladin smites and magnifies the impact of Action Surge and subclass abilities (Battlemaster Precision Strike, Cavalier's Mark, Samurai's Fighting Spirit, etc.)


Fights are unbalanced and bursty, due to fitting an entire day's risk, resource consumption, and HP loss into a single encounter. Instead of figuring out how to deal 100 damage over 10 rounds, you're now figuring out 100 damage over 3. Fights are either too easy or too hard, with no middle ground.

You can run one big fight this way, but you don't have to. If your one big fight is having four Shadar Kai suddenly materialize amongst the PCs and kamikaze themselves to death, yeah, that's going to be over in about 3 rounds, one way or another. But it could also be a fortified gate blocking the road along which the PCs must escort the refugee train, with two dozen hobgoblin archers on the walls (ready to shoot anything that gets within 600' without clearance), a handful of Iron Shadows on standby as reserves, and a Hobgoblin Devastator on overwatch. That fight is not going to be over in three rounds, and it could very easily last 10 - 60 rounds, especially if a large portion of the fight is spent in long-range archery duels or maneuvers (e.g. party monk sniping with a longbow to get half the hobgoblin archers to come down off the walls and chase him into the wilderness, so the rest of the PCs can come out of invisibility and crush them separately from the other hobgoblins).

No-rest classes like Fighters (especially Sharpshooter Fighters) will do far better than Paladins in this scenario, despite it being one big fight with no short rests between.

So, just make sure you build a wide variety of encounter types. If you do some bursty Shadar-Kai-kamikaze fights, also do some Combat As War-ish hobgoblin fort fights.

[Kurt Kurageous]

Waves. Wave after wave after wave. From the north, then the south, from above and from below. Then a necromatic bomb that turns all the slain foes into zombies that rise to fight again. Then an environmental effect that regenerates undead foes, harm party. Illusionary mirror imaged bad guy drawing fire. Attacks that lower ability scores like STR. Shadows do this. Reskin them to CON and its horrifying.

Elemental foes spawning from fire pit, water pit, windy tunnel, augmented by a giant or more that one.

Yeah, you can make one encounter enough of an encounter.

Waves do it. All the time.

[Man_Over_Game]

Fighters are more no-rest than short-rest. ....IIRC you analyzed sword-and-shield Fighter DPR vs. sword-and-shield Paladin DPR, but that comparison is right in the paladin's wheelhouse...

I'd say Fighters are definitely Short-Rest classes. Second Wind and Action Surge both refresh on Short Rest. Assuming an average character (Level 5, 2d6 + 4 damage), each Short Rest translates into +10.5 HP and +22 damage for the Fighter. The Fighter also could expect to have a higher Constitution (since he doesn't have any innate tertiary stats), and so will have higher-than-average Hit Dice.

As for the comparison, I compared both possible scenarios. Sword+Board on both translated to the Fighter being able to tie with the Paladin after 3 Short Rests. A 2d6 weapon on both translated to the Fighter being able to tie with the Paladin after 2 Short Rests. I guess I could compare a 2d6 Fighter vs. a Sword-and-board Paladin, but I'm not sure if it's necessary (as we've already compared 2/3 likely scenarios, both in the Paladin's favor).

Additionally, while the Paladin does gain features that utilize Charisma, it still outperforms the Fighter in combat with Charisma as a dump stat. Charisma as an additional stat is a bonus, not a requirement, for the Paladin's success. A Paladin can choose to be a Fighter, but a Fighter can never choose to be a Paladin. What's worse is that my estimates were based on a Paladin using stats like a Fighter, and did better than the Fighter. In a way, the Fighter only outperforms the Paladin when the Paladin allows it.

Even something like GWM, without some other kind of feature to synergize with, only increase your damage by about +1 per attack, and aren't limited to just the Fighter (Vengeance Paladin can get Advantage on attacks).

[MaxWilson]

I'd say Fighters are definitely Short-Rest classes. Second Wind and Action Surge both refresh on Short Rest. Assuming an average character (Level 5, 2d6 + 4 damage), each Short Rest translates into +10.5 HP and +22 damage for the Fighter.

But Extra Attack works all the time, and so does Extra Attack 2, and Archery fighting style, and feats (Sharpshooter, Crossbow Expert, Prodigy for grappling, etc.), and several subclass features like the Cavalier's Mark and the Arcane Archer's shooting.

Sure, short rests give them some extra goodies, but they aren't short rest-dependent. See again the hobgoblin scenario: a fighter is better off than a paladin would be, especially a ranged fighter.


As for the comparison, I compared both scenarios. Sword+Board on both translated to the Fighter being able to tie with the Paladin after 3 Short Rests. A 2d6 weapon on both translated to the Fighter being able to tie with the Paladin after 2 Short Rests.

I missed that part of your analysis, thanks. It's been a while since I read it. A fighter with just a greatsword and no feats is still relatively gimped, though, so no wonder it underperforms.

A more fair comparison for the fighter would be to look at a damage-focused build. In a long fight, a level 6 Sharpshooter/CE Dex 18 Fighter shooting for 20 rounds of combat at AC 15 will attack 3x at +4 for d6+14 per hit and will do 553.35 points of damage over those 20 rounds, plus whatever extra he gets from subclass features such as spellcasting/maneuvers/Fighting Spirit/whatever. If he gets a short rest, he'll get an additional Action Surge for an extra +17.85 HP of damage per short rest. That's not nothing but it's also not a great deal. The Fighter does almost as well with zero short rests as he does with two short rests.

A Str 18 PAM Dueling Paladin, on the other hand, will attack twice at +7 for d8+6 and a third time for d4+6, and will do 395 points of damge over those 20 rounds, plus 17d8 (76.5) if she smites with all of her spell slots like so many paladins do, for a total of 471.5 damage plus whatever extra she gets from subclass features such as Vow of Enmity/Sacred Weapon/whatever. If she gets a short rest, she'll get extra Channel Divinity (more Vow of Enmity, etc.). Again, not a whole lot to gain from the short rest but more than some Fighters get. A Str 20 Greatsword paladin would do slightly less damage (+8 for 2d6+5 for 350 damage, plus smiting damage) and a Str 16 GWM/PAM paladin would also do less (+1 for d10+13 or d4+13 for 381 damage, plus smiting).

The bulk of the Fighter's advantage over the Paladin is coming from the at-will features like Archery and the extra ASI for Crossbow Expert or +2 Dex. Short rests help both sides a little but not a great deal, except for certain subclasses (Battlemaster benefits greatly from extra short rests and in certain scenarios so does Oath of Vengeance).


Additionally, while the Paladin does gain features that utilize Charisma, it still outperforms the Fighter in combat with Charisma as a dump stat. Charisma as an additional stat is a bonus, not a requirement, for the Paladin's success. The fact that the Paladin is able to invest into Charisma means that the Paladin has that choice to invest in things other than combat numbers, where the Fighter does not. Should the Paladin ignore that (a valid choice for a Vengeance Paladin), the Paladin would have nearly identical stats to the Fighter, which is what my estimates were guessed around.

Even something like GWM, without some other kind of feature to synergize with, only increase your damage by about +1 per attack, and aren't limited to just the Fighter (Vengeance Paladin can get Advantage on attacks).

And yet, the Fighter winds up out-damaging the paladin, if the Paladin relies on smites as so many paladins do, even if the Paladin is prioritizing Strength over Cha.

Fighters are not a class which relies on short rests to be fun. They do just fine in long fights.

[Teaguethebean]

Hi there. My group recently came across the challenge of finding challenging battles.

We aren't an encounter heavy group, so squishing in more than one fight a day (let alone a session) is not something we would like to do.
We also don't really want to change into the Gritty Realism rules.

Thus, I ask: do you any of you have some experience with running games with these premises in mind?
I'd be glad to hear some suggestions on balancing fights to be challenging even when the party goes all out on each one.

I would also reccomend making all short rest resources multiplied by 3 as otherwise with only 1 fight the warlocks and fighters are just worse than the wizards and paladins in the same fights.

[djreynolds]

I would also reccomend making all short rest resources multiplied by 3 as otherwise with only 1 fight the warlocks and fighters are just worse than the wizards and paladins in the same fights.

That is a great solution, the game has been built upon having a long rest and 2 shorts rest a day. If you choose to compress the day, this allows fighter, warlocks, and monks to be full participants, but also helps out players with channel divinity as well.